Essential oils – extracts of certain plants that contain compounds that capture the “essence” of their scent – are an extremely controversial topic in medicine. With a wide variety of oils used in all areas from stress to childbirth, salespeople often make bold statements about their effectiveness and uses, with in many cases limited or no robust evidence to support them. That’s not to say that every single essential oil is bad – animal studies of peppermint, for example, suggest that it can aid digestion. But the marked lack of regulation and extreme claims made about many of these oils create an industry surrounded by pseudoscience.
However, sometimes these oils can be downright dangerous.
A certain group of essential oils, including eucalyptus and camphor, have pro-convulsive properties. This means that they can cause convulsions and seizures within the nervous system, which can be a serious problem for people with pre-existing epilepsy. Even so, these oils are regularly found in products that are easy to buy, often without warning of their shortcomings.
A new study has now found that these essential oils could be responsible for seizures in a significant proportion of patients admitted to four different hospitals in southern India for seizures. After advising these patients to avoid these oils, they noticed a drastic improvement in their condition.
Research is one of the first to examine the effects of these essential oils on seizures in adults, not just children, as previous research has examined. Their results were published in the journal Epilepsy Research.
To find out whether convulsive essential oils are involved in first-time or breakthrough seizures in patients with epilepsy and epilepsy syndrome, the researchers turned to four different hospitals. Over a four-year period, researchers monitored people entering these hospitals for their first or breakthrough seizure – a breakthrough seizure occurs after a person with epilepsy has not had a seizure for an extended period of time. They were asked various questions including whether they had recently taken essential oils, descriptions of the seizure, and possible other medications they might be taking.
The results showed that out of 350 patients, 55 (15.7 percent) had seizures associated with essential oil use – be it inhalation, ingestion, or topical application. These oil-related seizures were further broken down into sub-categories: oil-induced seizures (EOIS), of which there were 22; and Oil Induced Seizures (EOPS), of which there were 33. The oils most commonly affected were those of eucalyptus and camphor, which are known to have pro-convulsive properties.
Although this is an extremely strong correlation, the authors state that more research is needed before it is certain whether these essential oils are causative or just related to these seizures.
“The [essential oils] seem to provoke these seizures, but whether they are really causal or associative has to be clarified by further evidence from larger blinded studies, ”the authors state in the paper.
“Despite these restrictions [this study] is one of the largest studies of seizure-related essential oils in adults. ”
[H/T: The Academic Times]
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